Qiu Zhijie: Breaking Through the Ice

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing Until 25 May 2009

Stepping into Qiu Zhijie's solo exhibition Breaking Through the Ice at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing is like embarking on an ill-fated journey. Through installations, sculptures and ink paintings, the artist questions China's obsession with grand projects of modernization.

Credit: O. TAYLOR-SMITH/UCCA

In The Sinking Giant, an enormous, rusty ship's bow tilts upwards from a sea of broken blocks of ice. A dense mess of footprints on the deck evokes images of panicking passengers running in all directions. The bow also resembles the heel of a giant foot sticking out of the water. Both metaphors signal the ultimate decline of any vast man-made structure.

Further on, the ship's deck is littered with remnants of industrial products (pictured). The steel floor is deteriorating: parts peel off and curve upwards, revealing old newspaper cuttings citing revolutionary slogans and stories of China's engineering miracles. Lining the walls, 30 ink paintings together form a side view of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, an icon of China's industrial development.

In Nation-building Strategy, the hollow corpses of four water buffaloes, each cut in half horizontally, rest on bamboo mats. The lower halves of the bodies are filled with water; bamboo flutes float on the surface. Two iron rails are placed across the top of the installation. The buffalo heads and backs are lined up on the corroded floor, looking as if they are part submerged in water.

The buffaloes symbolize traditional agriculture in China. They are often depicted in idyllic landscape paintings accompanied by farmers playing bamboo flutes. Here, they appear in mutilated form, with railways crushing their backs. The artist expresses how China's rural heritage has been violently sidelined by industrial development.

Qiu is the first Chinese artist living in China to have a large solo exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. The gallery's location, at the heart of the Dashanzi art zone in northeastern Beijing, is pertinent to his work. The art zone grew out of a factory complex, abandoned in the late 1980s, which was part of the 'socialist unification plan' of military–industrial cooperation in the 1950s between China, the former Soviet Union and East Germany.

It is ironic that Qiu's critique of China's development path is displayed in a district threatened by impending destruction as a result of Beijing's urban sprawl.